White Silence Read Online Free Page B

here.”
    “I know,” Danny replied, in an odd voice.
    Duncan returned to his exercises, drawing his energy inward again and then releasing it in a glorious pattern of deadly motion.
    When it was completed, he rested briefly before donning his shirt.
    “I’ve not ever seen the likes of that, Mr. MacLeod,” Danny said. “It’s almost a dance, is it not? But a dangerous one.” He hesitated. “Nor have I seen a weapon like yours. It came from across this very ocean, Hugh said. Could I see it closer?”
    Duncan hesitated—any of their kind would—then handed the
katana
to the young Immortal.
    Danny took it, running one hand gently, carefully, down the blade. He fingered the grip, the intricate carving. Even in the dimness of the hold, the beauty of the sword was apparent.
    “I’ve been to a museum or two, with Hugh. And nothing there was the equal of this.”
    “It belonged to a very brave and noble man. A mortal,” Duncan said. He extended his hand, and Danny returned the
katana
. “It was his dying gift to me.”
    Danny smiled, with a twist of his lips. “I carry a dead mortal’s sword, too.” He produced his blade. It was the first MacLeod had seen of it. A military saber, an officer’s sword by the look of it, still bearing the gold-fringed tassel of rank.
    “You were in the war, then?” Duncan asked.
    “Aye,” Danny replied. “But I did not kill for this, if that’s what you are thinking. I died for it. In truth, when I got this sword, I’d died already four or five times.”
    He frowned. “I’d come to believe that I was an unnatural creature. A pookah, a thing that only the dead or dying can see. I thought that, when the war was over, if I went home, I would cease to exist. But there was none I could speak to about what had happened, so I kept on, marching and killing.”
    It was spring, 1864. The Union Army, under the command of General Grant, had moved south, taking the fight to the Rebs. For near a month, they fought clear down the state of Virginia, from a river in the north all the way to a city called Petersburg. History would say that those four weeks were the worst of the war. Danny O’Donal would not disagree. Men died by the thousands, Yank and Reb alike. Danny was wounded, more than a few times, and the others started to notice how quickly he healed. Even General Hays, who had led the men from Western Pennsylvania since the beginning, took note when Danny was one of but two of the thousands wounded to survive the fighting at Cold Harbor. Hays was killed the next day, though, so his noticing didn’t matter. Then his troops were put under command of a general named Burnside.
    By then the Union Army had Petersburg under siege. Burnside had the bright idea to tunnel under the city. He ordered a detachment of men from Western Pennsylvania, assuming they were all coal miners, to dig the tunnel and pack it with gunpowder. Danny was among them. And when the gunpowder was ignited and the explosion over, several Union divisions ended up trapped in the resultant chaos. Danny was among them, too, and he quickly fell to the Rebel fire from above. Wisely, the Union commander surrendered, and Danny, by then revived, was among those taken prisoner.
    “It was there that I finally found out what I was. Not a pookah. An Immortal, though what that might be …” He smiled faintly, and continued. “I was chained to a wall in a stable they were using to hold the prisoners when I got the—feeling. I’d gotten it once or twice before, during the fighting, but I hadn’t any notion what it was. Then a Reb officer, a captain he was, came into the stable. I could tell at once that the feeling was because of him. He ordered that I be unshackled and brought to his quarters.
    “He sat me down, got me coffee, and a good meal. And he told me.”
    The officer’s name was Lucas Desirée. He was a good man, fighting in a bad cause, and he wished he could do more for the frightened, inexperienced young man whom